Americans stay home as states urge coordinated federal coronavirus response

[webfact]

Americans stay home as states urge coordinated federal coronavirus response

By Maria Caspani

 

Men wear face masks at Times Square following the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19), in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., March 16, 2020. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. states pleaded with the Trump administration on Monday to mount a coordinated national response to the coronavirus pandemic, as millions of workers and students hunkered down at home to slow the spread of the outbreak.

 

The unprecedented wave of closures and restrictions, which began to accelerate last week, took on fresh urgency as New Jersey "strongly discouraged" all non-essential and non-emergency travel between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., starting on Monday.

 

"This will remain in effect for the foreseeable future. We want everyone to be home – and not out," Governor Phil Murphy said in a tweet.

 

Six Bay Area counties were expected to order a three-week "shelter in place" starting Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The order would close all but essential businesses and direct some 6.7 million people not to leave their homes as much as possible. It would make exceptions, including allowing people to shop for essential items and access healthcare.

 

New Jersey, New York and Connecticut struck a regional agreement to shut all movie theaters, casinos and gyms as of 8 p.m. Monday (0000 GMT), New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

 

Restaurants and bars in the three states -- where more than 22 million people live - will serve takeout and delivery only, he said in an address.

 

Michigan and Maryland, home to the port city of Baltimore and the northern suburbs of Washington, D.C., took similar measures as the confirmed coronavirus U.S. death toll rose to 73.

 

State restrictions on restaurants and places of leisure, while in line with expert advice to slow spread of the virus through social distancing, will hit many lower-paid workers in the service industry.

 

Bars, restaurants, theaters and schools were shutting down in New York, Los Angeles and other U.S. cities to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Lisa Bernhard has more.

 

PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK

Jessica Wilmot, owner of The Ancient Mariner pub in Ridgefield, Connecticut, said that while she feels closing shops is the right move, she worries about her mostly part-time staff who work paycheck to paycheck.

 

"Personally I'm all for containment," said Wilmot, noting that her revenues had already fallen about 40% last week from the prior week. "But my business view is, I'm nauseous."

 

Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, both Democrats, said efforts by state and local authorities were insufficient to confront the coast-to-coast emergency.

 

They called for bold federal action involving the U.S. military and Army Corps of Engineers. More than 4,100 people in the United States have been confirmed as being infected with the fast-spreading virus, prompting fears U.S. hospitals will soon be overrun similar to medical centers in Italy.

 

As traders reacted to drastic weekend measures from the Federal Reserve to stave off a global recession, U.S. stock markets plunged anew on Monday with most indexes off down 6% to 7%. S&P 500 companies lost more than $2 trillion in the first few minutes of business. [.N]

 

Major airlines sought a U.S. government bailout of more than $50 billion as the White House drafted a financial assistance package in the wake of the steep falloff in U.S. travel demand. Separately, U.S. airports are seeking $10 billion in government assistance.

 

President Donald Trump, a Republican, declared a national emergency on Friday and has championed his government's response. Democratic leaders have criticized him for downplaying the crisis and issuing misleading or false statements.

 

"This is a national problem. It cannot be done in a piecemeal method. You need federal parameters to stop the national patchwork of density-reduction closures," Cuomo said.

 

De Blasio, who has said that a lockdown of New York City was a possibility, told MSNBC the United States should be "put on a war footing where the federal government mobilizes all the resources necessary - and it begins with testing."

 

AMERICANS AT HOME

Some 64,000 U.S. schools were closed in at least 33 states, including in the nation's two biggest public school systems: New York City and Los Angeles.

 

School closures nationwide were affecting at least 32.5 million students, according to Education Week.

 

School districts are trying to find a way to provide meals and create lessons plans for the millions of students who are forced to stay home.

 

Many Americans also had no choice but to work from home, forcing many households to make the best of a difficult situation.

 

Karen Pisciotta, 52, a business consultant from Maplewood, New Jersey with a home office that will now be shared by her husband and three teenage children, decided humor was the best approach.

 

"There’s a strange man in my dining room. He’s been on the phone a lot, taking time only to eat my family's dinner leftovers. He says he's going to be here all the time starting Tuesday," Pisciotta posted on Facebook.

 

The outbreak has taken a major toll on U.S. sports. Major League Baseball said it will further delay the start of its 2020 season after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that gatherings of 50 or more people should be canceled or postponed for the next eight weeks.

 

NOT ENOUGH TESTS

The United States has lagged behind other industrialized nations in its ability to test for the novel coronavirus. In early March, the Trump administration said close to 1 million tests would soon be available and anyone who needed a test would get one, a promise it failed to keep.

 

Asked on CNN whether Connecticut had enough tests, Governor Ned Lamont said: "No."

 

I don't know where the federal government was. We should have been doing this weeks ago," he said.

 

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said it was important to react aggressively to combat the spread of the virus. "We are at a critical inflection point in this country," he told Fox News.

 

"We are where Italy was two weeks ago in terms of our numbers and we have a choice to make as a nation: Do we want to go the direction of South Korea and really be aggressive and lower our mortality rates or do we want to go the direction of Italy?"

 

The Italian outbreak has shown no signs of slowing, with 27,980 cases and 2,158 deaths by Monday.

 

South Korea has been praised for its measures to control the virus, such as setting up special zones around infection hotspots targeted with extra protective resources.

 

For a graphic on Tracking the spread of the global coronavirus:

 

https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-MAP/0100B59S39E/index.html

 

(Reporting by Maria Caspani; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, David Shepardson, Steve Holland and Doina Chiacu in Washington, Brendan O'Brien in Chicago and Barbara Goldberg, Nathan Layne and Gabriella Borter in New York; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by David Gregorio, Bill Berkrot and Lisa Shumaker)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2020-03-17

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[Kelsall]

"Six Bay Area counties were expected to order a three-week "shelter in place" starting Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The order would close all but essential businesses and direct some 6.7 million people not to leave their homes as much as possible."

 

How about the large numbers of homeless people there? Hopefully compassionate leftists like Nancy Pelosi will take them in.

 

 

Edited March 17, 2020 by Kelsall

[Redline]

Trumps s***show.  No prep, no guidance...is what happens when you hire your family and <deleted> kissers with no experience or knowledge of their positions-watch him fall

Edited March 17, 2020 by Redline

[Nyezhov]

8 minutes ago, Redline said:

Trumps s***show.  No prep, no guidance...is what happens when you hire your family and <deleted> kissers with no experience or knowledge of their positions-watch him fall

What do you want our Presdient to do over what he has already ordered?

 

Who are the ass kissers he hired who are involved in this matter.

Edited March 17, 2020 by Nyezhov

[bristolboy]

1 hour ago, Nyezhov said:

What do you want our Presdient to do over what he has already ordered?

 

Who are the ass kissers he hired who are involved in this matter.

Anybody who has been hired by trump and wants to keep their job. Not that ass kissing always works.

[techietraveller84]

Moving beyond US politics, WAPO published a really interesting article with moving graphics about viral spread and different strategies on preventing it.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/

[Redline]

5 hours ago, Nyezhov said:

What do you want our Presdient to do over what he has already ordered?

 

Who are the ass kissers he hired who are involved in this matter.

Come on, do some reading-no time for lessons 

[Redline]

7 hours ago, Nyezhov said:

What do you want our Presdient to do over what he has already ordered?

 

Who are the ass kissers he hired who are involved in this matter.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/16/trump-inauguration-warning-scenario-pandemic-132797
 

Disbanded this:

A directorate within the White House would have been responsible for coordinating the efforts of multiple federal agencies to make sure the government was backstopping testing capacity, devising approaches to manufacture and avoid shortages of personal protective equipment, strengthening U.S. lab capacity to process covid-19 tests, and expanding the health-care workforce.  
 The office would galvanize resources to coordinate a robust and seamless domestic and global response. It would identify needs among state and local officials, and advise and facilitate regular, focused communication from federal health and scientific experts to provide states and the public with fact-based tools to minimize the virus’s spread. The White House is uniquely positioned to take into account broader U.S. and global security considerations associated with health emergencies, including their impact on deployed citizens, troops and regional economies, as well as peace and stability. A White House office would have been able to elevate urgent issues fast, so they didn’t linger or devolve to inaction, as with coronavirus testing in the United States. It would be in charge of sharing information and coordinating our public health and humanitarian response with partners and allies. And it would work now to prepare the United States and the world for the next pandemic, including by developing incentives for global leaders and governments to rapidly finance and fill identified gaps.
 Pandemics, like weapons of mass destruction and climate change, are transnational threats with potentially existential consequences. No single department or agency can be responsible for handling them. Pandemic threats may not arise every year, but the White House should constantly prepare for them. We can’t afford for federal decision-makers to waste time relearning old lessons when they should be innovating and acting. 

Sorry a** lickers-all of them.  They are ordered to tell him how great he is ????

 

Everything Trump “ordered”

is late and still not happening-wonder why ????

[Nyezhov]

6 hours ago, Redline said:

Disbanded this:

I thought the WaPo already showed that allegation was fake news?. Am I reading that wrong?

 

What else ya got?

 

Answer for you: Nothing other than irrational Trump hatred.

[bristolboy]

52 minutes ago, Nyezhov said:

I thought the WaPo already showed that allegation was fake news?. Am I reading that wrong?

 

What else ya got?

 

Answer for you: Nothing other than irrational Trump hatred.

How about this from when Trump was asked on Jan 22k, one day after 1st cae in US was detected, when he was asked whether he was afraid that Covid could become a global pandemic:

Trump says the US has the coronavirus ‘totally under control’

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

https://nypost.com/2020/01/22/trump-says-the-us-has-the-coronavirus-totally-under-control/

And this is from the NY Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch. So no bleating about how the mainstream press is being deceitful.

[xylophone]

4 hours ago, Nyezhov said:

Nothing other than irrational Trump hatred.

How can hatred for trump be "irrational" when it is clear and obvious to any rational person that the man is a danger to the US because of his constant lying and his ignorance of just about everything he speaks of. 

 

Irrational?......no, perfectly rational to hate a despicable human being like this.

 

And he continues with his lies, lying to the American people who surely deserve better than this idiot..........

 

A video has emerged of Trump talking about cutting the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 — days after claiming that he knew nothing about the disbanded White House unit.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/coronavirus-video-trump-pandemic-team-cut-2018-a9405191.html

Edited March 18, 2020 by xylophone

[Nyezhov]

1 hour ago, xylophone said:

And he continues with his lies, lying to the American people who surely deserve better than this idiot.

But evidently not about tests.

 

1 hour ago, xylophone said:

Irrational?......no, perfectly rational to hate a despicable human being like this.

 

Despicable? Got it. How about his supporters.

[metisdead]

Some Twitter posts has been removed, please do not post anything that is not from a reliable source, no links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.

[bristolboy]

5 hours ago, Nyezhov said:

I thought the WaPo already showed that allegation was fake news?. Am I reading that wrong?

 

What else ya got?

 

Answer for you: Nothing other than irrational Trump hatred.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-trump-closed/2020/03/13/a70de09c-6491-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/

Edited March 18, 2020 by bristolboy

[Opl]

2 hours ago, Nyezhov said:

But evidently not about tests.

 

Despicable? Got it. How about his supporters.

Trump is rational; " “I’m a business person,” the president said in a White House press briefing in late February. “I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. “Some of the people we’ve cut they haven’t been used for many, many years, and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly and rather than spending the money.”” 

 Here's Video Of Trump Trying To Explain Why He Cut The Pandemic Response Team

President Donald Trump dismantled the US National Security Council’s pandemic response unit in 2018 ― a subject he claims to know nothing about now that the country is being buffeted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Edited March 18, 2020 by Opl

[metisdead]

A post with no shortage of troll comments has been removed. 

[OneMoreFarang]

On 3/17/2020 at 5:03 AM, webfact said:

Americans stay home

Great idea! I hope that includes all their military.

[Tug]

To hate trump imo is the only rational thing to do,a man that devides the nation makes us a pariah among nations insults pows attacks gold star family’s is ignorant wont listen to council goes from one blunder to the next uses up all the tools in the box to artificially stimulate the economy (now when we need them they are used up)lyes and trolls constantly what’s to like?other country’s  used to look to us for help in times of crisis what happened?trump happened that’s what